In
the 2001 preface to the Collected Stories of Saul Bellow,
his wife Janis described how her husband called her a “genius
noticer”. She later attributed the same quality to Bellow, after
seeing the legendary author at work. “When he is on to a story, his
capacity for hearing and absorbing details expands exponentially.”
That work-in-progress became The Bellarosa Connection, a
102-page novella which, while not being a masterpiece, does showcase
quite a bit of his close attention to detail, as well as other Bellow
hallmarks: musical, rhythmic prose, startlingly funny, unpredictable
metaphors, serial digression and not much by the way of plot.
Although
he is a very different kind of writer from Bellow, all of the above
can be safely said about Amit Chaudhuri’s 1991 debut novel, A
Strange and Sublime Address, almost equally slim at 109 pages.
The novel, an account of two summer vacations spent in Calcutta by
its protagonist, a young boy named Sandeep, quite deliberately avoids
conventional plotting, and chooses instead to focus on something
else: capturing a time and a place in history, not through
pretentious allegories, attentionseeking linguistic experiments or
other contrived literary hi-jinks, but through a meticulously
crafted, synaesthetic brand of prose which is like no other in
contemporary Indian writing in English.
A
departure from the constraints of a plot-driven narrative isn’t
merely a stylistic or formal device for Chaudhuri; the author is
making a larger statement here, about the wisdom of “jotting down
the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives and the life of a
city, rather than a good story.” Chaudhuri isn’t denying us the
‘real’ story just because he doesn’t like to write that way, it
is his authorial belief that one way to reconstruct the things which
matter about a character or a group of people, is through the ones
which apparently don’t. In the words of the author himself, “The
‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion, would
never be told, because it did not exist.”
The
novel starts off with a string of absolutely gorgeous passages about
Calcutta, the most confounding megapolis of them all; random slices
of life, which are tenderly evocative without once descending into
cliché or banality. Chaudhuri’s unique gift as a novelist is
perhaps this; to weave the elements of memory, perception and sensual
experience into narrative in a quiet, unobtrusive manner. An old grey
Ambassador, (which is the car we know as the ubiquitous yellow
Calcutta taxi) wages daily battles with its owner, Chhotomama,
Sandeep’s uncle. “It was battered like an old cardboard box, and
the needles on the dials on its dashboard never changed direction,
the futile compasses always pointing north. When it ran, the engine
and the ramshackle body of the car combined to make a grating, earthy
noise, like a drunk man cracking an obscene joke in a guttural
dialect and laughing at it at the same time.” The smell of mustard
oil, another quintessential Bengali preoccupation, triggers an
affectionate tribute, at once culturally accurate and aesthetically
superior.
“In
Bengal, both tamarind and babies are soaked in mustard-oil, and
then left upon a mat on the terrace to absorb the morning sun.
The tamarind is left out till it dries up and shrivels into an
inimitable flavour and a ripe old age; but the babies are brought in
before it gets too hot, and then bathed in cool water. With their
frantic miniature limbs and their brown, shining bodies, they look
like little koi fish caught from the Hooghly river, struggling into
life.”
The
above passage is a particularly apt example of that distinct quality
possessed by Chaudhuri’s writing: a profound stillness, an almost
preternatural calm as the author trains his eye on the city and the
infinite little stories to be told therein. To convey an entire
experience with any reasonable degree of authenticity (or even to
share but a moment of it with all its emotional and sensual
implications) requires an act of authorial alchemy, for lack of a
better term. The writer has to transcend the limitations of his
medium, in order to say, convey a very precise hue of color, or just
how tangy a lemon felt using nothing but words; as an author, one has
to bridge that gap between the written word and the sensory self. At
their best, Chaudhuri’s descriptions leave the reader in a state of
suspended animation; their beauty depends on, and is enriched by, the
reader’s ease of visualization.
To
that end, it helps that Chaudhuri pays more attention to sounds than
most writers. (In addition to writing and teaching Comparative
Literature, the author is also an acclaimed singer in the Hindustani
classical tradition, most recently composing and performing an
experimental music ensemble called This Is Not Fusion worldwide) In
Chaudhuri’s world, the radio “babbles like the local idiot”,
while the pages of the newspaper “crackle with festive intensity”.
Clearly, the author is inviting us to listen very closely indeed.
Equally attuned to the sounds of his own language, he gleefully
declares, “Chhotomama’s shelves were full of these books: Sarat
Chandra, Tarashankar, Rabindranath; like the names of wines, the
names of these authors; an entire generation had been drunk with
these names.”
In
Sandeep, Chaudhuri has a protagonist who, like the author, is a
Bengali kid growing up in Bombay. Coming from a megacity with a very
different set of sensibilities, Sandeep views Calcutta as an object
of limitless wonder. Being Bengali, and not actually from Kolkata,
gives him a tantalizing mixture of the outsider’s amused detachment
at the human circus out there, and the instinctive sympathy of
someone who has a latent connection with the culture. Consider this
passage about a Sikh taxi driver’s attempts at speaking Bangla:
“The
Sikh spoke a courteous Bengali to the women, made still more
courteous and comically elaborate by the fact that it was spoken in a
broad Hindustani accent and according to the rules of Hindustani
grammar. This gave the gentle, rounded sounds of the Bengali language
a masculine openheartedness; it even made the language smell of
onions and chappatis. Flattered and impressed, Mamima and Sandeep’s
mother giggled like schoolgirls.”
When
Sandeep notices the comically accented Bangla spoken by the driver,
one wonders if he mightn’t perhaps be thinking of his own failure
to read or write the language spoken by his family. The
aforementioned “distance” (whether cultural or otherwise) between
Sandeep and his uncle’s family also helps him to pick up on subtle
hints about Chhotomama’s financial problems, or his grandmother
Chhordimoni’s true nature, which she cloaks with a crabby,
uninviting exterior. In his gradual, unhurried development of plot
using steady accumulation of details, Chaudhuri reminds one of the
Japanese-English writer Kazuo Ishiguro, who, like Chaudhuri has had
his fair share of detractors using the “nothing-happens-for-so-long”
line of attack.
Amit
Chaudhuri is a rare breed indeed among English-language writers from
India. His works have nothing in common with the type of postcolonial
narratives which took off from where Rushdie ended. There is none of
the terribly compulsive wordplay, much of it involving Indian
English, that hydra-headed monster. Far from rejecting the social
realism and the incorrigibly sensuous side of the great modernists
like D.H. Lawrence, (Chaudhuri is also the author of a dissertation
on Lawrence’s poetry) in favour of pastiche, magical realist or
allegorical settings; Chaudhuri whole-heartedly embraces these
virtues of the masters of yore. In the introduction to The
Picador Book Of Modern Indian Literature, which he edited,
Chaudhuri talks about literature from India being typecast in this
manner:
“Rushdie’s
style, robustly extroverted, rejecting nuance, delicacy and
inwardness for multiplicity and polyphony, and moreover, the
propensity of his imagination towards magic, fairy tales and fantasy,
and the apparent non-linearity of his narratives- all these are seen
to emblematic of non-Western modes of discourse, of apprehension,
that is at once contemporaneously post-colonial and anciently,
inescapably Indian.”
Chaudhuri
himself is one of the strongest counter-voices in this discourse, a
bona fide original in a sea of indistinguishable voices. In his
subsequent novels like Afternoon Raag, or most
recently, The Immortals, he has realized the promise that
his first novel so amply displayed. For the sake of symmetry, we
shall turn, once again, to Saul Bellow in order to better comprehend
the effect that Chaudhuri’s writing has on the reader who cares to
listen:
“I
feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness
in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too,
and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with
an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”
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